Whether the mail should be sorted on Sundays, whether "In God We Trust" belongs on our coins, whether the Pledge of Allegiance should include "under God," whether our children should pray at school, whether we can have crèches on town commons at Christmas, everyone wants to know: What would the Founders do?

It's a question Thomas Jefferson found ridiculous. In 1816, when he was seventy-three and many of his revolutionary generation had already died, he offered this answer:

"This they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. . . . Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind."

The Founders believed that to defer without examination to what your forefathers believed was to become a slave to the tyranny of the past. Jefferson put it this way:

"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human."

The four books achieve a kind of consensus in four related lines of argument. First, the United States was founded neither as a Christian nation nor as a secular one. Second, by the standards of Evangelicals of both their day and ours, Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison were not Christians; they wrestled, often profoundly, with religious questions, but, as Church points out, "they all doubted the divinity of Christ." Third, the disestablishment of religion is itself responsible for Americans' unusual religiosity, which (these writers all believe) is something to celebrate. Fourth, notwithstanding the Founders' own remarkable secularism, the liberation of religion from government as much as the reverse was their aim. "The separation of church and state has greatly benefited religion, as Madison and Jefferson predicted that it would," Wills writes. Nussbaum argues that because "the separation of church and state is, fundamentally, about equality, about the idea that no religion will be set up as the religion of our nation," in the end "separation is also about protecting religion." Waldman writes, "Madison, I suspect, would . . . be delighted by surveys showing that, compared with most developed nations, Americans believe in God more, pray more, and attend worship services more frequently."

Because this debate is an argument about how the Supreme Court should interpret the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, people who enter it begin their investigation with the Founders; quite often, they end it there, too. Somewhere along the way, they almost always fall to wondering what James Madison would make of the latest Gallup polls or whether Benjamin Franklin would get along with Christopher Hitchens. That's how this debate works; that's the pack of tricks this history plays on the past. The problem is that constitutional jurisprudence, however essential it is to the rule of law, will always tend to produce a history in which the entire eighteenth century is reduced to the intellectual lives of a handful of men. And, because our tradition of constitutional jurisprudence is so important, that history can be all the history most Americans get. Needless to say, it's a history that leaves out a lot--not least, every other American who ever spread, advanced, or challenged the idea of religious liberty: people like printers turning out newspapers, mothers rearing children, pastors preaching to small towns, and, even, now obscure novelists. Maybe it's time for another pack of tricks.